Technical Field
The present disclosure concerns migration and archiving operations involving email platforms and other platforms (e.g., enterprise social networking platforms). More particularly, the present disclosure relates to a network-based solution that provides enhanced management of migration and archiving operations.
Background Art
Today, businesses create, deliver, and receive email on an unprecedented level. Many businesses provide each employee with a personalized email account and dedicated mailbox within an enterprise email platform. Some businesses shift toward cloud-based or “hosted” email platforms such as Office 365™ offered by Microsoft, Inc. (Redmond, Wash.), while others continue to move to newer on-premises email solutions. In either case, migrations between email platforms have become commonplace. And yet, such migrations continue to present a host of problems and difficulties. Given the sheer quantity and size of mailboxes and emails in use today, from small businesses with only a handful of registered email accounts to Fortune 500 companies with tens of thousands of registered accounts, businesses are struggling with the fact that migrating between email platforms can be expensive, time-consuming, tedious, and error-prone.
Although automated email migration solutions like OnDemand Migration for Email™ from Dell Software Inc. (Round Rock, Tex.) have provided businesses with significantly enhanced tools for automatically migrating between email platforms, one problem in particular has persisted in the industry—handling large email attachments. Modern day emails regularly include attachment files such as word processing documents, spreadsheets, or images. In some instances, attachments can carry massive file sizes (e.g., when attempting to send a high-resolution image or a massive data spreadsheet). Architects and other users who routinely send large email messages or attachment files (e.g., CAD files) are particularly susceptible to experiencing these problems. Within the migration context, many hosted email platforms deal with large email attachments by enforcing a predetermined limit on the size of an attachment that may reside in the platform. While businesses face no shortage of options when selecting an email platform, not all platforms enforce the same attachment size limits. Office 365, for example, enforces an email attachment cap of 50 MB. Other email platforms enforce more liberal attachment limits of 70 MB or even 100 MB.
When two email platforms contain different attachment size limits, migrating between them presents a significant problem. Take, for example, the common scenario in which a business decides to migrate to Office 365 after using hypothetical “Source Platform” for many years. The attachment size limit for Source Platform may be 100 MB, while attachment size limit for Office 365 is only 50 MB. Having used Source Platform for many years, the business may have had thousands of its employees, each with their own dedicated mailbox, sending and receiving emails with attachments that were below Source Platform's 100 MB limit but will now violate Office 365's lower 50 MB limit. In this common scenario, the migration process will ultimately fail or—at best—be characterized by poor data fidelity as emails with attachments above 50 MB are lost or migrated without their attachments.
Existing migration solutions face other obstacles as well. In addition to instances in which an email message or attachment file exceeds a predetermined size limit associated with the target email platform, messages or files may contain content that cannot be exported by the source email platform or, conversely, is not supported by the target email platform (e.g., object linking and embedding or “OLE” content). In other cases, problems may arise because a message or file contains encrypted content (e.g., messages residing in an IBM Notes® source platform, which uses a proprietary encryption methodology), corrupted content, or because the message or file resides in a personal archive that is password protected (e.g., a personal storage table or “PST” file). Given these issues, businesses are unable to reliably preserve their data when migrating between certain hosted email platforms. This significant problem has persisted in the industry despite previously attempted solutions.
One inadequate approach is to identify large attachments in the source platform prior to migration and then either delete the attachments or manually move them to an alternative storage platform to avoid causing failures during migration. That approach, however, requires significant manual effort and inevitably results in lost data due to human error or, at a minimum, a broken association between the attachment and the original email message. In some instances, migrating the attachment may require settling for a less than optimal but “best effort” conversion to a file type that the target source platform will support.
Another inadequate approach some have attempted involves reporting. During migration, large attachments are identified and simply logged as errors for any instances in which the migration process fails to successfully transfer an email message or related attachment to the target platform. The reporting method suffers from many of the same limitations as the manual approach described above. At best, the reporting provides businesses with a method of tracking which files they must go back and manually migrate to another location. Notably, many solutions that leverage this approach also fail to offer any guidance on how to preserve data fidelity or maintain the association between the removed attachment and the original email message.
Solutions like AttachThis™ and DropThis™ from Dell Software Inc. have proven useful for reducing the number of attachments maintained in an email platform, but they cannot be applied to automated migration processes. AttachThis and DropThis are add-ins for Microsoft Outlook that automatically upload email attachments to Microsoft SharePoint™, a hosted storage platform, rather than transmit them via email. The add-ins also insert links that direct users to uploaded attachments stored in SharePoint. In addition to being unsuitable for use during migration between email platforms, AttachThis and DropThis require every individual email user to download and install the add-ins on his or her local client. As a result, although they are quite useful for certain applications, the add-ins are difficult to uniformly adopt or implement across an entire enterprise email platform. The same limitations significantly diminish the utility of a similar yet open-sourced mail filtering tool called MIMEDefang. In addition to being unsuitable for automated migration processes, MIMEDefang also lacks the security features and other functionality necessary to make it serviceable on an enterprise-level.
On top of the limitations discussed above, previously attempted solutions also fail to provide any automatic response functionality that equips users with suitable alternative options for acting upon email messages and related attachments that cannot be migrated or archived. Nor do previously attempted solutions provide administrators with the ability to specify a criteria, or set of rules, for messages or files that the business does not want migrated or archived.
Existing migration solutions also provide limited contextual information about migrated email messages, related attachments, or other files that have been modified during the migration process. As a result, users are forced to make an educated guess as to the contents of any given attachment based on limited contextual information such as the file extension or any brief accompanying text. Faced with those restrictions, most users cannot quickly determine whether the content of the attachment is relevant or important. Instead, users must individually open each attachment to assess its relevancy or importance—a process that is not only laborious and inefficient for the user, but is also wasteful of the limited computing resources of the user computing device, the email platform, the hosted storage platform, and the network in general.
In addition to email platforms like those discussed above, other types of platforms, such as enterprise social networking platforms are also becoming increasingly popular. Two examples of popular enterprise social networking platforms include Jive™ offered by Jive Software (Palo Alto, Calif.) and Yammer™ offered by Yammer, Inc. (San Francisco, Calif.). The same problems discussed above apply equally with respect to these social networking platforms, which—like many hosted email platforms—enforce predetermined limitations on the size of files that may reside within the platform. Yammer, for instance, enforces a 50 MB limitation on file sizes.
The unprecedented level of email and other files generated by modern businesses has also given rise to various archiving solutions. Archiving solutions typically transfer data that is aged or infrequently accessed from a primary storage location to a less expensive secondary storage location. Current archiving solutions face many of the same limitations discussed above with respect to migration operations.
Given the foregoing, businesses continue to need easy-to-implement, enterprise-scale migration and archiving solutions that provide enhanced convenience, data fidelity, security, and suitable alternative options for processing email messages, attachment files or other files that cannot be migrated or archived. Businesses also need migration and archiving solutions that allow them to specify messages or files that they do not want migrated or archived based on various rules or criteria.